The latest news on avoiding dairy products if you are lactose intolerant, have milk allergies, are a vegan, or want to keep kosher.

The Lactose Intolerance Clearinghouse Has Moved.

My old website can be found at www.stevecarper.com/li I am no longer updating the site, so there will be dead links. The static information provided by me is still sound.

For quick offline reference, you can purchase Planet Lactose: The Best of the Blog as an ebook on Smashwords.com or Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com or a whole lot of other places that Smashwords is suppose to distribute the book to. Almost 100,000 words on LI, allergies, milk products, milk-free products, and the genetics of intolerance, along with large helpings of the weirdness that is the Net.

I suffer the universal malady of spam and adbots, so I moderate comments here. That may mean you'll see a long lag before I remember to check the site and approve them. Despite the gap, you'll always get your say. I read every single one, and every legitimate one gets posted.

Monday, July 26, 2010

Slate.com recently had a long article on the history of raw milk advocacy, "The Raw-Milk Deal: Pure-food worshippers put their health at risk—especially when they drink unpasteurized milk," by Deborah Blum.

Today, just about 0.5 percent of all the milk consumed in this country is unpasteurized. Yet from 1998 to 2008, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention received reports of 85 infectious disease outbreaks linked to raw milk. In the past few months, physicians have treated salmonella in Utah, brucellosis in Delaware, campylobacter in Colorado and Pennsylvania, and an ugly outbreak of E. coli O157-H7 in Minnesota, which sickened eight people in June. Epidemiologists not only identified a rare strain of the bacteria but matched its DNA to those stricken, the cows on the farm that supplied them with raw milk, and manure smearing the milking equipment and even the animals themselves. When regulators shut down the dairy farm, supporters promptly charged them with belonging to a government conspiracy to smear the reputation of a hallowed food.

Some, like Wisconsin raw-milk champion Max Kane, dismiss infectious disease altogether: "The bacteria theory's a total myth," Kane told one interviewer. "It allows us to have an enemy to go after similar to how it is with terrorism. It's food terrorism."

After a dairy in Washington state was linked to an E. coli outbreak last December, the farmer himself put it like this in an interview with the Seattle Times. Scientists were wrong to malign his milk because "everything God designed is good for you."

Sigh.

My position on raw milk is that its safety is as good as the farm that sells it. The farm has to be pretty near perfect to keep cattle from being infected. If the farm's standards are supremely high, there is nothing wrong with raw milk. However, it is extremely difficult to keep standards that high, and the more cattle the harder it is to do.

The flip side is that there is nothing special about raw milk, although it very well might taste better. It is not healthier for you. For sure it has no special properties that make it drinkable for those who are lactose intolerant. Sometimes it seems like every raw milk advocate spews forth this nonsense about LI and I have to admit that it prejudices me against their case. If they are that wrong on this crucial point, what else might they be wrong about?

For those who advocate raw milk, the comments on that article contain many passionate defenses. The conflicting claims about statistics are a problem. Here's my take. The raw, pardon the pun, numbers of illnesses from raw milk are small, but since so few people have access to raw milk, there are a disproportionate number of illnesses per capita. That worries me.

I'll also fault Deborah Blum on one side issue. Yes, it's true that organic foods aren't more nutritious and that people who say that are simply ignorant. But most knowledgeable proponents of organic foods make the different claim that they taste better. You can test objectively for nutrition; you can't test for taste. That's subjective. We do know, however, that many foods have been bred to travel well so that they can be shipped to market in better condition, often better-looking condition, but that this affects taste. If you want to argue in favor of organics for taste then you have a much better case, and one that Blum should have mentioned.

About Me

I'm lactose intolerant. I wrote the book on the subject. Literally. Milk Is Not for Every Body: Living with Lactose Intolerance is its name.
I've researched everything on the subject of lactose intolerance for 30 years. I know just about everything about living without dairy products. That means I've been able to help people with dairy protein allergies, vegans, those who want to keep kosher, and others who want to reduce, limit, or eliminate dairy from the diet.
I keep an eye out for information that might be useful. You can see a lot of it at my website, Steve Carper's Lactose Intolerance Clearinghouse (www.stevecarper.com/li). The Milk Free Bookstore and the Product Clearinghouse sections have something for everybody. But the site got too big to update regularly and too cluttered to find information easily.
That's why I started this blog. It really does cover the planet for lactose- and dairy-related items. I think I have the only blog in the world that does this.
So please check it out regularly. Send me items you think may be of interest. Ask me questions: I answer every one, either here or by email. stevecarper@cs.com